“If it were not made in China,” says hotel mogul Richard Born, “it would be unaffordable.”
He’s talking about the cost of his new condo building on Perry Street, developed with Ira Drukier and Charles Blaichman. The team caused quite a stir six years ago with their two Richard Meier-designed towers on the Perry waterfront; those buildings arguably incited the clamor for “starchitects” — superstar designers in residential developments.
Now, for a follow-up, the developers have just launched sales at 166 Perry Street, an eight-story, 24-unit doorman building they are erecting alongside the Meier towers. The glass-fronted tower, designed by curve-and-wave pioneers Asymptote Architects, is on the site of a former parking garage they bought as part of a three-site package in 1999.
“We didn’t want to just add a fourth Richard Meier building,” says Born. (The third Meier-designed building, completed two years ago at 165 Charles Street, was built by another developer.) “We didn’t want to do something too outlandish, but we definitely wanted to make an architectural statement.”
Prices will range from $2 million to $11.5 million at the condominium, which will contain some daring design elements, including lobby decor reminiscent of “A Clockwork Orange.” The building is being constructed on the foundation of an existing six-story structure. Two new floors will be added, the brick façde will be removed and concrete re-poured. The building will be framed in steel to enable it to support its massive curtain wall, which is being shipped over from Asia in one piece.
Literally edgy design
The architects are a husband-and-wife team: Hani Rashid (who is the brother of the prolific industrial designer Karim Rashid) and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote, famous for their computer-driven art installations and transformative, futuristic institutional buildings.
New Yorkers may know their Meatpacking District New York flagship for retailer Carlos Miele, which uses curves to showcase the designer’s catsuits. The pair has also done the Guggenheim “Virtual Museum” and HydraPier, a building housing technology and art in Holland.
With 166 Perry, they are thrilled to be getting a crack at residential design in New York. “One of the extraordinary things about New York is the change in light and the quality of the light,” says Rashid. To capture and manipulate that flow, the architects will cover the front of 166 Perry in specially shaped and treated panes of glass. The façde will be playfully articulated with a series of beveled edges, known as chamfers. “The chamfering of the glass produces a set of reflections,” explains Rashid. “Certain angles will pick up bricks across the street; other angles will pick up the sky. You get a kind of collage-like, almost painterly façde that oscillates between modern glass, sky and reflection of the finer grain of the neighborhood.”
The building will serve, says Rashid, “as a kind of less-austere segue or transition to the [more starkly modern] Meier buildings.”
What’s more, all that angling and the special glass treatments will ensure the building’s millionaire residents some privacy.
“Some of the window walls,” says Born, “have filaments between the glass that allow you to look straight out with an unobstructed view, but when you look at it at an angle, it becomes opaque. If you stand in a room with an open shade, someone can be looking up at an open wall of glass, but not see in.”
Sculpted interiors
Each of the two-dozen apartments at 166 Perry will have a corner window with floor-to-ceiling glass to capture views and light. The apartments will have 12-foot ceilings and open kitchens filled with appliances that are hidden behind sculptured white Corian when not in use. The inside bathroom walls will also be made of sculptured Corian into which sink tops and cabinets are fused.
Thanks to the setbacks on the two-story addition to the building, the two penthouses will have terraces and swimming pools. The other 22 loft-style apartments have two and three-bedroom layouts.
The Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group is handling sales. Prices per square foot are about $2,000 and residences range in size from 1,126 to 3,430 square feet. The building’s lobby and other common interiors will be quintessential Asymptote. “The curved line, the waves, are very typical of the work they’ve produced over the years,” observes Born. A retro-futuristic backlit white Corian lobby installation will be reminiscent of the décor at the Korova Milk Bar in “A Clockwork Orange,” with flourishes of “2001.” It’s the architects’ answer, says Rashid, to the question, “What is elegance and beauty and a sense of luxury in a 21st century doorman building?”
The ground floor of the building, with its metal canopy and perforated metal scrim, will be “a finely constructed and crafted sculptural addition to the street,” says Rashid, “which serves double duty because it is a screening device for the people in the apartments on the ground floor.”
Those curious about the look may only have to wait another couple of months.
“The building, the whole steel-and-glass façde, is being constructed in Shanghai and will be shipped to New York,” says Rashid. The piece was ordered over a year ago, but can be installed quickly. “People who walk by now don’t realize that behind that black tarp a building will go up in a couple of days once the curtain wall arrives,” Rashid notes. The condominium should be ready for occupancy in spring 2008.
Since it was signed to design 166 Perry, Asymptote has won several vastly larger commissions around the world, including the tallest tower in Asia, a 150-plus-story building in Busan, Korea. “It’s gotten higher,” says Rashid, “because our client wants to beat another tower. The number is secret.”
Still, he says, “this building on Perry Street will probably get us more attention than most of our big projects, because it’s in New York, and anything you do in New York counts tenfold.”
While Asymptote has been based in New York City since it was founded in 1989, Rashid says the builders were able to capitalize on the high level of technical achievement and quality of craftsmanship that has evolved in Shanghai, spurred by a ferocious building boom. “From our point of view, we’re getting good quality,” he says, “and from the developer’s point of view, they’re getting a good price.”
One of the building’s most fun technical effects is the transfer of light inside, “with translucent and electronic walls in the bathroom,” says Rashid, “containing a filament that is electronically charged, at a very low voltage.”
As a result, the walls “turn opaque when you hit the switch, and go translucent when you hit the switch the other way. We used it in a project in Holland for a room where the Queen [of Holland] became obsessed with it. She just sat in the room hitting the switch back and forth.”